Year: 1991
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In my early years I remember being taught that in Greek the name Peter meant rock.I was told that Catholics, therefore, argued that Christ was to build his church on Peter, because he said " ... thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church."I also became aware of the counterargument that called attention to the context of the verbal exchange, and that since Christ was addressing Peter, if he had he meant for the church to be built on Peter, He would have said "upon you" I will build my Church, but since the Savior spoke in the 3rd person "this rock," surely he intended another antecedent, and that antecedent would be the fact that the Spirit revealed the knowledge that Christ was the son of God to Peter; in other words, the antecedent was the process of revelation (Matt.16:14-18).These discussions were my first initiation to gospel doctrine being supported by linguistic argumentation.Since• then, I have been intrigued by the way we use language to explain gospel concepts.In this discussion, I am not concerned with this particular type of syntactic argument, but rather with another type: the use and analysis of words to make doctrinal points.The way teachers and writers sometimes define words, including the arguments they make about them, have interesting implications for how the membership of the Church understands and believes.To gain a view of what is involved, I believe I can list the ways we use words to support gospel teaching in four categories: 1) foreign language insights, 2) English language distinctions, 3) fanciful etymologies, and 4) ex post facto etymologies.While I will discuss each of these uses, my primary concern is with types 2 and 4, because in them I find potential problems.Because of time constraints, I will only address the problems inherent in type 4.
Author: Melvin J. Luthy
Institution: Brigham Young University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W821044262